The Glass Castle Theme Essay

In Jeannette Walls’ narrative piece, The Glass Castle, the most consisting theme of the novel is abuse through neglect, which is demonstrated by her own parents. According to Webster's Standard Dictionary, abuse means “Vicious or cruel treatments; to injure by mistreating”. Specifically, child neglect is the failure of a parent or guardian to provide the necessities for a child, such as: shelter, safety, supervision and nutritional needs. In this novel, Jeannette’s parents, alongside others, are the abusers. At a very young age, Jeanette and her siblings suffered from abuse through neglect on various occasions because their parents weren’t watching over them and didn’t take responsibility.
The abusers in this novel are Jeannette’s parents …show more content…
She realizes that no one was going to protect her and take responsibility but herself. Some of the things she had to do was to go out in the cold and borrow a pail of water from Mr. Freeman. “Cold weather is good for you. It kills the germs.” That seemed to be true, because none of us kids ever got sick. But even if I’d woken up one morning with a raging fever, I never would have admitted it to Mom. Being sick meant staying home in our freezing house instead of spending the day in a toasty classroom” (pg. …show more content…
As we continue to read Jeannette’s story, we see the way she was abused by her family and other people they have come across; we are also able to see that the parents don’t act upon what’s going on with their children. With Jeannette’s alcoholic father and her mother who is nothing but self­interested who only cared about her own happiness than her own children, causes Jeannette to struggle to take care of her family, especially her siblings. The parents have neglected their children physically and emotionally which caused their children to being too skinny due to malnutrition, bad hygiene, and frequently unsupervised during unsafe situations and